Braid: Hancock defends Tory realm wearing rose-coloured glasses

Don Braid, Calgary Herald04.05.2014

Dave Hancock speaks in Edmonton, on Thursday March 20, 2014. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson

MLA Steve Young said Friday it is important that party members air their feelings about past faults and changes that need to be made. “When you try to justify or minimize things, people see through that. Our response is certainly important to the public.”Walter Tychnowicz
/ Edmonton Journal

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In government and politics, the post-Redford world is shaping up. It looks just as weird as the Redford world.

For starters there is Dave Hancock, the new but temporary premier, who could more aptly be called The Defender of the Realm.

Hancock hasn’t uttered a word of criticism for any past event, practise or fiasco that brought the PCs to a dreadful state in the polls and ended Alison Redford’s career as premier.

He doesn’t have a sideways thing to say about the premier’s suite, lavish severance packages or the revelation that communications staffers — who have slowly spread like mould through the legislature — now cost $23 million a year.

Hancock even takes as wholly benign the blast levelled by Jim Dinning, the former PC treasurer and leadership candidate, in a Herald op-ed piece this week.

Dinning didn’t say there’s a sense of entitlement, according to Hancock. He just said there shouldn’t be any.

What Dinning actually wrote, after lamenting the outcome of the past two leadership races, is that “entitlement breeds and flourishes when government and political parties forget who the boss really is.”

Dinning said the PCs need a premier who will “tackle with gusto the dysfunction within. A leader who’s determined to fix it — blow it up where necessary — from the party to caucus and cabinet, and even within parts of the public service.”

That will sound like criticism to most Albertans — but not to Hancock, who seems as determined as Redford to deny facts right in front of the government’s face.

Hancock also says: “It’s not my place to critique the past.”

If not, why is he premier at all?

Some of his own caucus members might be wondering; and that really matters for once, because the PC MLAs voted him into this job.

Past premiers were always chosen first by the party. The three who were later pushed out by that same party — Don Getty, Ralph Klein and Ed Stelmach — stayed in the job until their successors won leadership contests.

But when Redford left the premier’s office last month, the PC caucus voted in Hancock within four days.

He might learn that caucus election cuts both ways, if he keeps sounding like an apologist for everything that happened in the Redford years.

On Friday there were already hints of discontent. Edmonton MLA Steve Young, who was deeply unhappy with Redford’s practices, said “we have to get all the stuff out.

“It is what it is. We shouldn’t try to justify it or minimize it or call it a rose. We should shine a light on it and be accountable for the good things and the bad things.

“When you try to justify or minimize things, people see through that. Our response is certainly important to the public.”

Young isn’t criticizing Hancock at this point — just saying that caucus will decide how to take the government through the six-month leadership contest.

The subtext here is that the MLAs, not the premier, now run the government.

If they don’t get a grip, and Hancock continues to play Pollyanna, the six-month forecast for the PCs is steady thunderbolts from campaigning cabinet ministers, while the government itself defends the status quo.

That’s always a factor in a leadership campaign — Stelmach had to ignore criticism in 2011 — but today emotions run so deep, and the political danger is so dire, that civil war could erupt among PC factions.

Only one thing would be certain at that point; if the realm collapses, Dave Hancock will go down cheering.

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